For ordinary Cameroonians, it was not the kind of news they’d anticipated from their head of state about the country’s upcoming October 12 elections. President Paul Biya had clocked 92 and was the oldest leader in the world. He’d disappeared for 42 days, fomenting beliefs he was in ill health and could no longer rule the bilingual nation. But Biya defied all odds.  “I am a candidate for the 12 October 2025 presidential election,” the nonagenarian president wrote on X, effectively rolling out the red carpet for a half-century rule over Cameroon. Biya ended the July 13 post with the phrase “The best is still to come,” leaving Cameroonians fuming. “The best is yet to come after 40 years?” wrote a commenter. “Pure madness.”

The social media bashing has continued since then, but it hasn’t stopped the president—rarely seen these days—from sending out daily, carefully crafted messages on Facebook and X, schooling Cameroonians on unity, good governance, and peace. Meanwhile, his all-powerful secretary general, Ferdinand Ngoh Ngoh, has been hosting political and religious leaders in the presidential palace in Yaoundé on his behalf, drawing reproach from critics who say the president has turned the state house into campaign headquarters.  “[This] is because they have access to the state purse, and they feel they can use it to their advantage,” said Tilarious Atia, a Cameroonian doctor specializing in comparative politics.

Having barred 2018 runner-up Maurice Kamto from contesting this year’s elections, and left with a fractured opposition, Biya’s enormous state overreach—whether legal or illegal—will earn him an unassailable victory. Last month, the country’s Constitutional Council maintained Elections Cameroon’s (ELECAM) rejection of 71 candidates, including Kamto, leaving Biya with 11 challengers in the poll. The challengers: Cameroon Party for National Reconciliation president Cabral Libii, who came third in the 2018 poll; Joshua Osih, who succeeded late former Social Democratic Front (SDF) opposition leader John Fru Ndi; lawyer and anti-corruption crusader Akere Muna; and Issa Tchiroma Bakary and Bello Bouba Maigari, two former Biya allies who broke away from the government to rival the president’s 43-year rule.

Bakary and Maigari, who head the Front for the National Salvation of Cameroon (FNSC) and National Union for Democracy and Progress (NUDP) parties, respectively, had been crucial in helping Biya’s Cameroon People’s Democratic Movement (CPDM) secure votes in their native Muslim-dominated northern regions (Adamawa, North, and Far North), which has 40 percent of the country’s electorate. “I had decided to accompany him until the end of his career,” Tchiroma told Brut, speaking of Biya. “Unfortunately, he is inaccessible; he is invisible.” Tchiroma said Biya’s ruling the country by proxy, while Maigari, who served as Biya’s first prime minister in 1982, has accused his government of corruption, poor governance, and sectarianism.

Osih and Muna, both contestants of the previous elections, have promised reforms. Osih wants to decentralize power by ushering in federalism, and Muna wants to make Cameroon corruption-free; he believes it will clean the country’s global reputation. Libii, who came third out of the nine contestants in the 2018 elections, aged 38 at that time, is campaigning on improved infrastructure and better conditions for young people.

The only time Biya felt challenged in an election was in 1992 when he got 40 percent of the votes, beating Fru Ndi by 4 percent more, though the opposition leader contested the outcome. Fru Ndi, a multiparty politics crusader, received support from several opposition parties under the banner Union for Change, still there was a divide among them. The late Adamou Ndam Njoya and Jean-Jacques Ekindi ran independently when factions of their parties endorsed Fru Ndi. Ndam Njoya and Ekindi amassed almost 4 percent of the votes, which could’ve been enough to nudge Fru Ndi to parity with or victory over Biya.

This year, there have been frantic attempts to put forward a united opposition front, but the question of who should lead it and differences in ideologies have been stumbling blocks.  “Issa Tchiroma thinks he’s the best, Bello Bouba thinks it’s time for him to be president, [and] Joshua thinks the SDF has been doing the work since 1992 and they are better placed [to win],” Atia said. A small portion of opposition parties, mainly in Littoral region, have backed Tchiroma, though Kamto called on all parties to rally behind one candidate.  Because there’s no opposition party that’s represented in all the 360 administrative units of the country like the CPDM, according to Atia, Biya won’t break a sweat to win in a single-round electoral system that requires a party to get the highest votes. If two-thirds of the votes go to the splintered opposition parties, then Biya secures one-third of them and gets the highest, he would be declared the winner.

There could be a major coalition before the elections, just like in 2018 when Muna backed Kamto a few days before the poll, but Atia thinks it will miss the boat as ELECAM has already printed ballot papers for the candidates and will not withdraw any if a candidate backs out to support another. “The electoral code is very clear, that were you [a candidate] to step aside, you have to announce such intentions before the ballot papers are printed,” he said. Atia said displaying the ballot paper of an endorser candidate during elections will likely cause confusion for voters in remote areas, who are not aware of such a change.

The inability to present a unified opposition is part of the deep-seated ethnic and linguistic divides that plague Cameroon. First, it inherited English and French from colonialism, which means minority English-speakers feel marginalized by the French-speaking majority—the differences birthed a brutal separatist war. Second, ethnic tensions have led to power struggles among the Bamilekes, Bulu-Beti, and the northern regions. The Bamilekes, an ethnic group that occupies mostly western Cameroon, came into prominence in the 1960s and ’70s when they waged a guerrilla war against the government over ties with former colonial power France. Since then, they’ve amassed economic power, running most of the country’s industrial sector. Kamto, who is from the group, faced prejudiced attacks during and after the 2018 election from primarily Bulu-Beti factions.

“I think that the obsession, the instrumentalized anti-Bamileke fixation has become a technology that can explain much more the eviction of Professor Kamto,” Achille Mbembe, a Cameroonian historian and political theorist told Radio France Internationale (RFI) when the Constitutional Council upheld Kamto could not contest this year’s elections.  For the Bulu-Beti, Biya’s (their son’s) ascension to power in 1982 has meant they are the hereditary rulers of Cameroon. They wield enormous political power, and they are part of the Cameroonians who think the presidency shouldn’t return to a northerner as the first president, Ahmadou Ahidjo, a northerner, dominated power for more than two decades before picking Biya as a successor.

But the northerners are queuing in. At least two leaked diplomatic talks parallel Tchiroma’s decision to “accompany” Biya “until the end of his career.” In 2009, the late former Minister Amadou Ali stated that the three northern regions would support Biya as much as he wanted, but would not welcome a successor from the Bulu-Beti or the economically viable Bamilekes.

Cameroon is a unitary state with overwhelming presidential powers. So when political scientist David Easton famously described politics as “the authoritative allocation of values” in the mid-20th century (meaning a comprehensive distribution of resources, rights, and benefits by a government), Biya understood this, but designed Cameroon’s political architecture in his own image.

He expands his cabinet, appointing state functionaries and ministers in nearly every district of the country, according to Atia. In return, these appointees either sympathize with his party or become militants. “If you are appointed minister of education today,” Atia said, “whether you are of the CPDM or not, it is inferred that you will protect the [ruling] party’s interest.” That’s how many civil servants including teachers who are looking to move up the ladder within government find themselves supporting the party.

Recently, the CPDM published a list, which one of its militants, Patrick Rifoe, dubbed “l’armée du président,” (the president’s army). It contains the names of hundreds of militants, state officials, ministers, directors of state corporations, and some prominent figures in sports, such as former Marseille goalkeeper Joseph-Antoine Bell, who heads a body that manages Cameroon’s sports infrastructure, and football icon Samuel Eto’o, who now runs the country’s football federation. These people will crisscross the country, campaigning for 92-year-old Biya during the elections, who’ll likely remain in the presidential palace or in his village Mvomeka’a (where he spends much of his private time these days) and wait for the results.

As in the past, people who crusade and win votes for the president during elections are rewarded handsomely with government appointments and favors, Atia said. This shifts any focus, if at all there’s any, to remove him from power. “Biya’s position is spared; nobody is interested in Biya’s position,” he said. “Everybody is interested in having something.”

Just as in 2018, Biya is poised for a landslide victory on October 12. There might be pockets of protests, but not as many as the previous election, when Kamto supporters protested after the opposition leader said he’d won the election. But the problems that have haunted Biya’s protracted rule will continue: the long, drawn-out Anglophone Crisis in Cameroon’s English-speaking regions, years of underdevelopment engineered by corruption and syphoning of state funds, and now a battle for succession.

Worn out by the crisis, with no end in sight, the solution for the Northwest and Southwest regions’ youth: flee abroad. They are among 60,000 Anglophone Cameroonians seeking refuge in different countries, ever since the separatist war started, according to the US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants. Atia said there are about one million voters in the regions; however, with a fresh round of separate-imposed ghost towns, in defiance of the election, most voters will feel insecure to go out and vote, except CPDM militants who might receive protection from law enforcement to vote their party. In that way, according to Atia, the CPDM will likely claim most of the votes there.

To measure Cameroon’s underdevelopment under Biya, one has to compare its GDP with Côte d’Ivoire, a country that shares almost the same population size and shared almost the same economic output in the 1970s. Côte d’Ivoire’s GDP gap over Cameroon jumped from $7 billion in 2010 to more than $30 billion in 2023, putting the country at $86 billion against $51 billion for the latter. While increasing value added per industrial worker and manufacturing are responsible for the Ivorian economic boom, Cameroon’s has plummeted. “I believe that everything stopped [working] in Cameroon since the beginning of the `90s,” Mbembe told RFI.

It’s unclear whether the power brokers in Yaoundé will prepare any transition plan after the election. But Tchiroma’s allegation that Biya is distant from his ministers, that the president has not met his ministers for the past 14 years, only strengthens speculation about his waning power. So, these days, it’s his secretary general or “vice dieu” (vice god) as he’s called in government circles, who’s been running most affairs at the palace and instructing ministers. Ngoh Ngoh now exercises the power with little or no opposition from other political rivals, after jailing a member of a rival group for the brutal killing of journalist Martinez Zogo.